Transmission of ancient remains--The unique fragment and unique
book--Importance of the former--The St. Alban's Grammar-School
find--A more recent one or two--Mr. Neal's volume--A tantalising
entry in a country catalogue--_The Hundred Merry Tales_--Large
volumes only known from small fragments--Blind Harry's
_Wallace_--Aberdeen and other Breviaries--The Oxenden Collection
of Old English Plays--The idyll of _Adam Bell_, 1536--John
Bagford: his unsuspected services to us--Ought we to destroy the
old theology?--Other causes of the disappearance of books--Unique
books which still preserve their reputation--Rare books which are
not rare--Books which are rare and not valuable--Ratcliff, the
waste-paper dealer, who had a collection of Caxtons--The
bystander's manifold experiences--Narrowness of the circle of
first-class buyers--The old collector and the new
one--Speculative investors.
LOOKING at the imperfect and unconsecutive condition in which much of
our most precious early literature has been received by us, we are apt
to reflect to how narrow and close an accident we owe two classes of
existing remains: the unique book and the unique fragment. Of course
to term a volume or production unique is a perilous business; the
bookseller and the auctioneer may do so _ex officio_; an inexperienced
amateur may resort to the term as a pleasant and harmless
self-deception; but no responsible writer or critic dares to pronounce
anything whatever unique without an emphatic _caveat_. We have
personally known cases where a publication by one of the early
printers was first introduced to notice, and created a sort of
sensation, as a mutilated fragment rescued from the binding of another
work; this revelation brought to light, after an interval, a second of
a different issue; anon at some auction occurred a perfect copy; and
now the poor damaged worm-eaten leaves, once so reverently and so
tenderly regarded, awake no further interest; the mystery and romance
have vanished; and when we examine the book as a whole, we do not find
its merits so striking as when we strained our eyes to decipher the
old binder's pasteboard.
The FRAGMENT is really an unusually and more than at first credibly
important feature in the elder literature. It may be taken, after all
deductions for occasional discoveries of the entire work, to be the
sole existing voucher for a terribly large section of the more popular
books of our forefathers, just as the Stationers' Register is for
another. But it is far more than one degree trustworthier and more
palpable; for it is, like the _torso_ of an ancient statue, a
veritable part of the printed _integer_ and a certificate of its
publication and former existence. Many years ago there was a great
stir in consequence of the detachment from the binding of another
book--Caxton's _Boethius_--in the St. Alban's Grammar-School of a
parcel of fragments belonging to books by Caxton; these are now in the
British Museum. In the Huth Catalogue are noticed several relics of a
similar kind; and indeed scarcely any great library, public or
private, is without them. They may be accepted as provisional
evidences. A rather curious circumstance seems to be associated with
one of the Huth fragments--three leaves of Thomas Howell's _New
Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets_. The relic once belonged to Thomas
Martin of Palgrave, and includes two leaves of signature D, which are
deficient in the Capell copy of this work at Cambridge. The latter is
described as a quarto; but it would be interesting to discover that
from the fragment the text could be completed. The inconvenience
attending the examination of rare books in provincial libraries is
very great and serious.
A copy of Statham's _Abridgement of the Statutes_, printed at Rouen
about 1491, and bound in England, had as flyleaves two sheets of
Caxton's _Chronicles of England_, possibly some of the waste found in
Caxton's warehouse after his death.
There is a weird fascination about a newly found fragment of some lost
literary composition. Only a few months since, in a copy of Cicero's
_Rhetorica_, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1546, in the possession of
Mr. Neal, quite a number of pieces of wastrel were disclosed on the
removal of the covers, and among them portions of English metrical
effusions of the period (for the volume must have been bound here). We
view this _treasure trove_ wistfully and indulgently; there it is; no
mortal eye had fallen on it in the course of three and a half
centuries; and how can we be expected to judge its value or quality
by the ordinary standard--on an ordinary critical principle? It has
come to us like an unlooked-for testamentary windfall. We are not to
look at it in the mouth too curiously or fastidiously, or we deserve
to have lost it; and it is the very same thing with scores of remains
of the kind, brought to light in various directions and ways from
season to season, and (to the utmost extent of my power and
opportunity) chronicled by me on my accustomed principle.
When I was younger by some thirty years, I received the catalogue of a
provincial bookseller, and was sanguine enough to suppose that I
should become the happy master at the marked price (7s. 6d.) of No.
2084, which ran as follows:--
"Pynson and others--Specimens of Early Printing, comprising
_Twenty Leaves of the Ballad of Robin Hood, &c. &c._, taken from
the cover of an old Missal."
No time was lost in giving the order; _but the lot was sold, and the
proprietors did not even know who had bought it_. I comforted myself
as the fox did. Yet such is the frailty of one's nature, that one
cannot refrain, after long, long years, from sentimentalising over it.
There is something so taking in the notion of a tattered,
semi-illegible, unappropriated fractional relic, not a trunk even; it
fascinates us like a coin of which the legend is almost beyond
identification; there is mystery behind it; we may be on the track of
a discovery which will help to make us famous.
We have all heard of the _Hundred Merry Tales_, rescued by Mr.
Conybeare in the early years of the century from another book, of
which the fragments assisted to form the covers, and how the treasure
was prized till a complete copy occurred in a Continental library and
dispelled the charm. It was pointed out many years ago by the present
writer (_Old English Jest-Books_, 1864, i., Additional Notes) that
Scot, in his _Discovery of Witchcraft_, 1584, quotes the story from
this miscellany of the miller's eels, and enabled us, before the
Goettingen copy was brought under notice, to complete the text, which
is almost undecipherable in the Conybeare (now Huth) one.
The fragmentary state by no means restricts itself to literary items
of insignificant bulk. For, as we see, a potential factor in the
creation of rare books has been a vast temporary popularity, succeeded
by a prolonged period of neglect. The result is before us in the
almost total evanescence of thousands of books extending to hundreds
of pages. Look at Blind Harry's _Wallace_, a large volume, first
printed in folio about 1520; a few leaves are all that remain of the
_editio princeps_; and others have totally vanished. Many of us are
familiar with the tolerably ample dimensions of the service-books of
various uses in the English Church; and yet those of Aberdeen,
Hereford, and York survive only in fragments or _torsi_; and the
modern reprint of the first was formed from a combination of several
imperfect originals. A similar fate has all but overtaken such
excessively popular works as Coverdale's Bible, 1535, and Fox's
_Martyrs_, 1563, an absolutely perfect copy of either of which I have
never beheld.
Henry Oxinden, of Barham in Kent, was the earliest recorded collector
of old English plays, and bound up his 122 dramatic possessions in six
volumes before 1647. He has left a list of them in his manuscript
common-place book. Tears almost steal into our eyes as we read the
titles: the _Hamlet_ of 1603, the _Taming of the Shrew_, 1594, _Ralph
Roister Doister_. Of the first we know well enough the history to
date: two copies, both imperfect. The second exists in the unique
Inglis, Heber, and Devonshire example; it is mentioned in Longman's
Catalogue for 1817, from which it was purchased by Rodd, and sold to
Mr. Inglis; it is reputed to have once belonged to Pope. The remaining
item survives in the titleless copy at present in the library of Eton
College, to which Mr. Briggs presented it in 1818, not on account of
the association of Udall the author with that seminary of learning,
but, curiously enough, by mere accident.
Among Bagford's collections there is a single leaf of an otherwise
unknown impression of Clement Robinson's _Handful of Pleasant
Delights_, a 1565 book only hitherto extant in a 1584 reprint. This
precious little _morceau_ altogether differs, so far as it goes, from
the corresponding portion of the volume now preserved in the National
Library.
Let me insist a little on the instructive progress of knowledge in one
or two cases. A fragment of a small tract in verse by Lydgate, from
the prolific press of Wynkyn de Worde, was proclaimed as an
extraordinary and unique accession to our literary stores some eighty
years since; it was called _The Treatise of a Gallant_, and had been
taken from the covers of a volume of statutes in the library at Nash
Court. Some time after, a complete copy of another impression turned
up, and ultimately a third, quite distinct from either of the previous
two, was discovered in a volume of marvellously rare pieces sold by a
Bristol bookseller to the late Mr. Maskell for L300, and by him to the
British Museum. Take another case connected with the same press. A
piece entitled _The Remorse of Conscience_, by William Lichfield,
parson of All Hallows, Thames Street, who died in 1447, leaving a
larger number of MSS. behind him than Lamb once humorously made
Coleridge do, long enjoyed the reputation of being a solitary
survivor; but at present the world holds four, two recovered from
bindings, and a third titleless, and all, in fact, more or less
dilapidated by unappreciative or over-appreciative handlers. Last, not
least, the delightful idyll of _Adam Bell_, of which we were so glad
on a time to follow the Garrick exemplar, is now proved to have been
in type in the reign of Henry VIII.; and a piece of a pre-Reformation
issue luckily preserves enough to show how, even in a production
probably sold at a penny, it was thought worth while to alter a
passage where the Pope was originally alluded to.
There are instances where we are deprived of the gratification of
beholding so much as a morsel of a book sufficient to establish its
former existence in hundreds, if not thousands, of copies. Of the
_Four Sons of Aymon_, from the press of Wynkyn de Worde, 1504, not a
vestige has so far accrued; yet it once existed, as it is expressly
cited in a later issue. So it is, again, with Skelton's _Nigramansir_,
printed by De Worde in 1504, which was actually seen by Weston the
historian in the hands of Collins the poet, and with _Peter Fabyl's
Ghost_ (the Merry Devil of Edmonton) from the same press.
We are accustomed to associate with the black-letter fragment the name
of JOHN BAGFORD, who, in the closing years of the seventeenth and
beginning of the next century, distinguished himself by the zeal with
which he collected typographical specimens and memorials. In Bagford's
day, the relative value of old books was scarcely at all understood;
there was no adequate discrimination between the productions of Caxton
and his immediate successors and those of living or recent printers;
and, again, which was more excusable, volumes by early divines or by
writers of established repute were more generally sought than those by
schools of poetry and fiction, which at present command chief
attention and respect. If we turn over the pages of an auctioneer's
catalogue belonging to that era, we perceive, side by side, items
estimated at about the same figure, of which many have become worth
perhaps even less, while a few have left their former companions
immeasurably behind, and one or two rank among the _livres
introuvables_. Those were the days when the classics were preserved
with the most jealous care, and acquired at extravagant prices, and
when our vernacular literature, from the introduction of typography
down to the Restoration, was an object of attention to an extremely
limited constituency, and could be obtained for a song.
The Bagford collection of title-pages and fragments formerly
constituted part of the Harleian manuscripts in the British Museum,
but has been chiefly transferred to the printed book department of
recent years. It resembles a Typographical Cemetery, a charnel-house
of books crowded together without respect to their subject-matter or
their literary rank: the leaf of a Caxton, another of a valueless
legal treatise, the title-page of _Romeus and Julietta_, on which
Shakespeare founded, as the phrase goes, his own play, and a
broadsheet preserved entire, there being no more of it. But Bagford,
who helped Dr. Moore, Bishop of Ely, and perchance Lord Oxford, to
some of their rarities, does not stand alone. He had many followers;
but the scale of operations diminished as the orthodox collector
multiplied and prices rose. Sir John Fenn, editor of the _Paston
Letters_, whom we have named above, was a disciple, however, and
Martin of Palgrave was another. Many years since, for a proposed new
_Biographia Britannica_ by Murray of Albemarle Street, the present
writer collected all the known particulars of Bagford himself, who
spent his last days in the Charterhouse. His episcopal client or
patron died in 1714.
Before we condemn these biblioclasts, let us recollect one thing. It
is not so much that they have rendered books imperfect by the
abstraction of leaves or title-pages, as that they have actually
preserved the sole testimony for the existence of hundreds of books,
tracts, and broadsheets of which we should have otherwise known
nothing, amid the wholesale destruction of early literature, which was
not arrested till the close of the last century, and still proceeds in
a modified form and degree. Not many years since the _Troy-Book_
printed by Caxton was discovered hanging up in a water-closet at
Harrogate; a portion had disappeared, but the remainder was secured,
and was sold to a dealer in Manchester for thirty guineas. It must be,
and is, Bagford's apology that he sacrificed to his typographical
scheme material which was almost universally neglected, and for which
there might seem, two hundred years ago, scarcely any prospect of a
future call. Yet, oddly enough, this very person was one of the
pioneers, by his labours and example, in bringing back a taste for the
older English school; he appeared at a juncture when sufficient time
had elapsed for the destruction by various agencies of a vast
proportion of the products of the press; but until the fashion, which
he and others set, had begun to spread, it remained unknown how much
was reduced from its original volume, and how much had perished. We
have the less pretence for censuring the biblioclasts of the past,
who could only use the eyes and experience of their own epoch, when
instances are reported from time to time of the same ruthless
practices even by those who might have been expected to know better;
and there is more than one way of viewing the present notorious
tendency to exterminate the old theology on the plea that it is
worthless, since a generation may arise which will upbraid us for
having converted to pulp this part of our inheritance, till it comes
at last to survive in a stray leaf here or a mangled fragment there.
An altogether different quarter from which a result conducive to the
shrinkage or disappearance of copies of early works has arisen is the
print-collecting movement, involving the devastation of the
innumerable volumes which contain portraits, frontispieces, and other
engravings, and the more than incidental risk of the consignment of
the unvalued residue to the waste-basket; and it may be mentioned that
within our personal knowledge hundreds upon hundreds of scarce old
books have been destroyed by editors, lexicographers, and other
literary workers, to save the trouble of transcribing extracts. It
might be impossible to exhaust the variety of ways in which an
extraordinarily large body of publications of former days has been
reduced or raised to the position of rarities of graduated rank.
After all these ages, all the indefatigable researches which have been
undertaken for profit or for pleasure, all the libraries which have
been formed and dispersed, true it is that the Unique volume, which of
course enjoys its designation only till a second copy is producible,
still survives in such abundance, that one, if it were otherwise
feasible, might form a library composed of nothing else. Does it not
become curious to consider to what lottery, as it were, we owe
them--owe their arrest just at the dividing line between living and
lost literature? Whatever may be the cause, we have hitherto failed to
trace duplicates of the metrical _Ship of Fools_, 1509, _Queen
Elizabeth's Prayer-Book_, 1569, Watson's _Teares of Fancie_, 1593,
_Venus and Adonis_, 1593, 1599, and 1617, and of _Lucrece_, 1598.
Copies of these later productions must have found their way to
Shakespeare's country at the time. Malone met with the _Venus and
Adonis_ of 1593 at Manchester in 1805, and another collector with that
of 1594 in the same shire; and the Florio's _Montaigne_ of 1603, the
only volume with the poet's autograph yet seen, was long preserved at
Smethwick, near Birmingham. It was at Manchester, too, that the copy
of the _Tragedy of Richard III._, 1594, came to light as recently as
1881. Several of the works of Nicholas Breton and Samuel Rowlands
survive in isolated copies. Upwards of a century has elapsed since a
medical man picked up in Ayrshire in 1788 an assemblage of quarto
tracts belonging to the ancient vernacular literature of Scotland and
to the parent press of Edinburgh; and not a whisper has been raised to
suggest the existence of a second copy of any of them, which is to be
regretted so far, as some are imperfect. During years on years, the
authorities at the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, kept this
inestimable relic in a cupboard under the stairs. In the find at
Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, thirty or forty years since, there
were items upon items utterly unknown. It was the same at the
Wolfreston sale in 1856. It goes without saying that among the Heber
stores the uniques were barely numerable; and many yet preserve their
reputation as such. Mr. Caldecott, Mr. Jolley, and Mr. Corser were
lucky in falling in with scores of tracts of the first order of
rarity. No one has beheld the double of the _Jests of the Widow
Edith_, purchased by Lord Fitzwilliam for L3 10s. at West's sale in
1773, and formerly Lord Oxford's; and the citation of the last name
prompts the remark that many a book in the Harleian Library still
awaits recovery, assuming the description in the catalogue to be
correct. On the contrary, there are serious warnings to enthusiasts
not to rely too implicitly on the reputation of a volume for
uniqueness or high rarity in view of such phenomena as the occurrence
within a short period of each other at the same mart in 1896 of two
copies of the first edition of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, printed
by Caxton. Here was a case where the publicity afforded to these
matters brought out a second example, which the owner found to be
worth a small estate.
The writer's publication, _Fugitive Tracts_, 1493-1700, 2 vols., 1875,
very aptly and powerfully illustrates the present bearings of our
subject. Of the sixty pieces there reproduced, two-thirds appear to be
unique, and only four are traceable in the Heber Catalogue. Yet many
of the items are of historical or biographical importance, and were,
in fact, selected from a much larger number with that view; which
seems to be tantamount to a recognition of the truth, that, enormous
as is the total surviving body of early English and Scotish
Literature, it represents in some sections or classes only a salvage
of what was once in type, or, to speak more by the card, of what we
have so far been able to recover.
There are rare books which, paradoxical as it may seem, are not rare.
Take, for example, Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, 1621; the first
folio Shakespeare, 1623; Milton's _Lycidas_, _Poems_, _Paradise Lost_,
_Paradise Regained_, in the _editiones principes_; the works of the
minor poets, Suckling, Carew, Shirley, Davenant; Walton's _Angler_,
1653; Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, 1678; the Kilmarnock Burns, 1786;
and many first editions of Wordsworth, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson.
Every season swells the roll of existing copies. On the contrary,
Spenser's _Faery Queen_, Books i.-iii., 1590, and Milton's _Comus_,
1634, are authentically scarce, the former especially so in fine
state; and the same may be predicated of Lovelace's _Lucasta_ (the two
parts complete). But the real meaning of the rarity of the other books
above specified--and the list might be readily enlarged--is that,
although the copies are numerous enough, the taste for capital
productions has increased within a few years out of proportion to the
recovery of new or unknown examples.
We are finding frequent occasion to cite works of foreign origin,
which are more or less habitually taken up into our own collections by
miscellaneous or general buyers; and there is among these one which
forms a signal illustration of the fallacy of uniqueness. It is the
Gutenberg or Mazarin Bible. Scarcely a library of the first rank
occurs here or elsewhere without offering a copy; and we are persuaded
that at least forty must exist, either on paper or on vellum,
throughout the world. The book occupies the same bibliographical
position as the first folio Shakespeare, the first edition of Walton's
_Angler_, and the first Burns; it tends to grow commoner, yet, so far,
not cheaper.
There are other books which, as it may be more readily understood, are
rare without being valuable, and of which such of the commercial world
as has it not in its power to expend large amounts on individual
purchases, naturally seeks to make the most. It was almost amusing,
some time since, to note the entries in some of the booksellers' lists
under "Black Letter," "Gothic Letter," "Rare Law," "Curious Early
English," and so forth; and the names of Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and
other ancient printers were freely introduced to help off a rather
lame foreigner, who was alleged to have been professionally associated
with one or the other of them. If the bookseller knows the book-buyer,
it is highly requisite that the latter should study what he is going
to buy.
Illustrations are not wanting of the loss of untold treasure through
a medium more fatal than any other--through exhaustive popular demand.
Entire and large impressions of books, pamphlets, and broadsides have
succumbed, not to the sacrilegious hand of the spoiler, but to the too
affectionate, and not too cleanly, fingering of the multitude of men
and women who read and then cast the sources of entertainment away. If
we remember that certain of the Bibles ordered to be kept in churches
for general use chiefly survive in crumbling fragments, or at best
woefully dilapidated copies, we cease to be surprised at the easy prey
which more fugitive compositions have formed to a succession of
careless and indifferent owners. The illiterate inscriptions on many
books, which have thus become valuable, point to the hands through
which they have passed, and tell a story of prolonged neglect, too
often culminating in appropriation to domestic requirements.
It is, anyhow, perfectly undeniable that of the miscellaneous early
literature of all countries, the proportion which exists is in very
numerous instances no more than a simple voucher for the work having
passed the press. A single copy has formerly occurred or occurs
fortuitously, and no duplicate can be cited. This is the position of
thousands of volumes, and of many it is the chief merit.
Infinitely numerous are the strange tales, sometimes drawing up the
moisture into the mouth, sometimes sufficient to make one's hair
rigid, of books of price hung up for use at country railway stations,
or employed by a tobacconist to wrap up his pennyworths of snuff, or
converted by a lady of quality into curl-papers. What has become of
the Caxtons sent over to the Netherlands in the last century by a
confiding English gentleman their owner, for the inspection of a
nameless Mynheer his friend, who, when he was invited to restore them,
lamented their disappearance in a fire?
There was beyond a question an epoch, and a prolonged one, when the
mill shared with household demands an immense quota of the cast-off
literature of these islands. One of our early collectors of Caxtons,
Ratcliff, whose books were sold in 1776, acquired his taste (one in a
thousand) through his vocation as a chandler or storekeeper in the
Borough. We may surmise how his Caxtons came to him, and at what
rates!
These episodes appertain to the romantic and speculative aspect of
book-collecting; but they really have another side. Here, at a time
when the first-fruits of the English press were unregarded, we find a
man of Ratcliff's status acquiring thirty Caxtons. He lived just to
see a rise in their value, yet a very slight and fluctuating one; for
at last he went into the open market and purchased a few lots at
West's auction in 1773, and the Caxtons thus obtained re-sold after
Ratcliff's death in one or two cases at a lower rate. He had inflated
the market; the competitors were not more than two or three. But the
time was soon to come when such persons could no longer afford to hold
this kind of property--when it became fashionable for dukes and earls
and men of large property to make our early typography an object of
research; and so it continued down to the present time, till the
agricultural depression arrived to create another organic change, and
to direct these, as well as other costly luxuries, into new channels.
Not the chandler, or the Government official, or the private gentleman
of modest means, but the great manufacturer or the merchant-prince
entered on the scene, and wrested from the landowner his
long-cherished possessions. The West and Ratcliff sales (1773-76) were
the two golden opportunities, however, of which the advisers of George
III. wisely availed themselves to purchase volumes at what we have
been taught to consider nominal prices; and there they are in the
British Museum to-day, a recollection of one of the better traits in
the character of that prince. When we say that the market for Caxtons
in 1776 was beginning to expand, we mean that the day for getting such
things for a few pence or a shilling or two had gone by. Here, for
example, are some of the quotations from the Ratcliff auction:--
L s. d.
Chronicles of Englande, fine copy, 1480 5 5 0
Doctrinal of Sapyence, 1489 8 8 0
The Boke called Cathon, 1483 5 5 0
Tullius de Senectute, in Englyshe, 1481 14 0 0
The Game and Playe of Chesse 16 0 0
The Boke of Jason 5 10 0
Legenda Aurea; or, the Golden Legend, 1483 9 15 0
These figures make even some of those in the West auction, 1773,
appear by comparison rather extravagant. For his Majesty's agent at
the latter gave as much as L14 for the romance of _Paris and Vienne_,
from the Caxton press, 1485. True, it seems to be unique, and might
to-day require its purchaser, if it were for sale, to have L500 in his
pocket or at his bank to secure it. Yet strange events still continue
to happen from time to time. Not Caxtons nor Shakespeares, but
excellent books which command prices in the open market, are yet
occasionally given away.
A case occurred in Lincolnshire about a year ago, when a library of
some 2500 volumes was sold by an intelligent provincial auctioneer _al
fresco_ in the dogdays, and put up in bundles, nearly all of which
were knocked down at the first bid--_threepence_. Say, 150 lots at 3d.
per lot = L1 17s. 6d. for the whole. There must have been an _entente
cordiale_ among those in attendance, the gentleman in the rostrum
inclusive.
These instances of misdirection, which have been in times past more
numerous than now, although two of the most recent and most signal
have occurred in the same county (Lincolnshire), inevitably tend to
the destruction of copies, and so far illustrate our remarks on the
causes of the gradual disappearance of books during former periods.
There are, however, circumstances under which prices are depressed by
collusion, as where a first folio Shakespeare was knocked done for L20
in an auction-room not five hundred miles from Fleet Street; or by an
accident, as when the original _Somers Tracts_, in thirty folio
volumes, comprising unique _Americana_, fetched _bona fide_ under the
hammer only L61. A single item was re-sold for sixty guineas, and
would now bring thrice that amount. What a game of chance this book
traffic is!
Imperfect Books, as distinguished from Fragments, constitute a rather
complex and troublesome portion and aspect of collecting. They are
susceptible of classification into books--(1) Of which no perfect copy
is known; (2) Of which none is known outside one or two great
libraries; (3) Of which even imperfect examples, as of a specimen of
early typography or of engraving, are valuable and interesting; (4) Of
which copies are more or less easily procurable. It is only the last
division at which an amateur of any pretensions and resources draws
the line. With the other contingencies our keenest and richest
book-hunters and our most important public collections have been and
are obliged to be satisfied. When it is a question of a unique, or
almost unique, Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, or Pynson, or quite as much of
a volume from the London, St. Albans, Tavistock, York, or Edinburgh
presses, what is to be done? The object, no doubt, _laisse a desirer_;
but where is another? This sentiment and spirit operated twice, as we
have elsewhere noted, within three months in 1896 in the case of two
incomplete copies of the first edition by Caxton of Chaucer's
_Canterbury Tales_. But for the defective copy of a common book some
find an apology and a home: they cannot afford a better, or they
require it for a special purpose. The upshot is, that for every old
volume there is a customer, who is pleased with his acquisition
according to his light; and we have met with such as seemed disposed
to view the missing of damaged leaves as negative evidence of
antiquity and genuineness.
The bystander who has had the benefit of as long an innings as the
present writer, witnesses perpetual changes and vicissitudes of
sentiment; and from one point of view, at all events, the minute
details, into which the too generally despised bibliographer enters,
are valuable, because they present to us, in lists of editions of
authors and books published from age to age, the astonishing evidence
of mutable popularity or acceptability. There is a feature, which is
almost amusing, in the ideas and estimates expressed of many works by
our earlier antiquaries, when we look to-day at their position and
rank. If we turn over the pages of Hearne's _Diary_, for instance, we
constantly meet with accounts of literary curiosities and rarities,
which we regard with different eyes by virtue of our enlarged
information, while thousands of really valuable items--valuable on
some score or other--go there unnoted, although copies of them must
have passed through the sales, even more frequently than at present.
The close of the nineteenth century has brought these matters to a
truer level. We are better able to gauge the survival of books and
editions.
Even in the sometimes tedious enumeration of editions of early books
bibliography confers a sort of benefit, for it demonstrates the
longevity in public estimation and demand of a host of books now
neglected, yet objects of interest and utility to many successive
ages.
We have seen so many cranks and fancies successively take possession
of the public. Early typography; early poetry and romances; books of
hours; books of emblems; Roman Catholic literature; liturgies; Bewick;
Bartolozzi; the first edition (which was sometimes equally the last);
books on vellum, on India-paper, or on yellow or some other bizarre
colour or material, debarring perusal of the publication; copies with
remarkable blunders or with some of the text inadvertently
omitted--all these and a legion of others have had their day; and to
some of them it happens that they drop out of view for a season, and
then reappear for a second or third brief term of life and favour; and
therefore, it being so, who can have the heart to blame the parties
that in the exercise of their vocation make hay while the sun shines?
There is one personage, and one alone, who makes it whether or no,
summer and winter, to wit, the auctioneer; his commission is assured;
on what or from whom he gets it he cares not. He cheerfully leaves the
adjustment of accounts to gentlemen outside.
The circumstances under which a new departure takes place, often
without much previous warning, in the book-market, and disturbs the
calculations of holders of certain classes of stock, are infinitely
varied. The bibliographical barometer is surprisingly sensitive, and
the slightest change of fashion in the older literature, and even in
those sections of the more recent which embrace acknowledged rarities,
is instantaneously felt. In some branches of collecting, and where the
prices of commodities are such as to exclude all but a knot of wealthy
amateurs, the entrance of a new-comer on the ground makes a vital
difference, especially if the market is in need of support from
existing wants having been supplied; and if one goes about a little,
one hears men whispering in corners and questioning who the stranger
is, and for what he is likely to prove good. Should he be a strong
man, that is, in purse, you will soon perceive, if you keep your eye
on the auction-room, another strong man buying at all costs against
all comers just the articles which commend themselves to the first
_dramatis persona_. He buys nearly everything; they are for him alone,
unless there are two in the field concurrently, and then one may be
conveniently played off against the other. A small field it is!
And this interesting commercial strategy is always going on, while the
objects of pursuit continually vary. The dealer looks after, not his
own desiderata--for he has none--but those of his immediate clients.
In a large business a man is likely to have many; but the class which
repays study, which turns sovereigns into bank-notes for him, is not a
numerous one. Half-a-dozen first-rate customers keep a shop open even
in the most fashionable and expensive thoroughfare. The late Joseph
Lilly leant during his last years mainly on one. A collector of the
stamp of Mr. Hartley was almost sufficient to support such an
establishment as Newman's in Holborn or Toovey's in Piccadilly. You
might pass the latter, or both, day after day and week after week, and
not see a soul enter or leave the premises; all was done by
correspondence and flukes and a few real good buyers in the
background. Mr. Quaritch in London or M. Fontaine in Paris will clear
more in an afternoon by the change of hands of two or three heavy
items than a small dealer, even if he is unusually lucky, will do in a
twelvemonth out of thousands of petty and troublesome transactions. It
is not particularly unusual for a big firm to sell at one sitting four
or five thousand pounds worth of property. There are others which have
not sold as much during the entire term of their career, and never
will.
The works which enjoy their turn of public favour are generally
recognisable in the catalogues by the type in which they are set
forth; and any one who has stood by and witnessed all the changes of
the last thirty or forty years observes periodical phenomena in the
transfer of typographical honours from one school of authors, or one
group of subjects, to another. The most recent auctioneers' catalogues
reflect the sentiment of the day in lavishing capitals on trifles from
the pens of more or less ephemeral modern writers, and registering
with corresponding brevity much of the old English literature, which
a few years since was in the ascendant. A rare volume of Elizabethan
verse or prose halts after an insignificant brochure by Lamb, Dickens,
or Thackeray, which the respective authors would have judged scarcely
worth preserving, to which their indifference, in point of fact,
constitutes the cause of scarcity and consequent appreciation.
So it was once upon a time, to be sure, with the Caxton, the quarto
Shakespeare, the ballad, the penny black-letter garland, and many
another article which we now hold so precious. The man who could
secure Caxtons and Shakespeares for pence, was he happier? Why, no;
for he simply followed the market and nobody was envious. He lifted
his acquisition off the counter or stall for the best of all
reasons--because he fancied it--nay, because he intended to read it
when he reached home.
A plea from the absolute collector's point of view--I fear, a weak and
false one--is occasionally advanced for books which were formerly in
fashion and favour; for example, Sylvester's _Du Bartas_, the Platonic
romances, Townley's French _Hudibras_, and a hundred--a thousand--ten
thousand more. It is thought to be worth while to have a few of these
deposed idols to show to your friends when they visit you, that they
may join in a homily on changes of taste. Perhaps it would suffice to
compare notes through the medium of some _Censura Literaria_, or
Beloe, or Collier. With most people space is a consideration, with a
few, money; and an incidental and passing reflection need not be so
costly in either way. For that reason such works as I have indicated,
and a few others similar to them, are apt to prove serviceable and
economical.
The periodical reinforcement of the ranks of the book-collecting
world, in the higher latitudes at least, is obviously imperative, as
individuals do not usually commence investments of such a kind till
they are well on in life and have put by a fortune, or at all events
retired from business. Some purely accidental matter directs attention
to a line of bibliography which appears attractive and important; the
money is there, and the expert will undertake the rest. It is not the
interest of those engaged in the business to be critical; they are
merely executive agents. But the demand for the costlier rarities and
curiosities is so narrow, that the fresh aspirant is soon the central
object of attention to the few who can provide him with what he
imagines he wants. As a rule, where a man has no personal knowledge,
and finds that he is gradually becoming a milch-cow for the trade, the
hobby is not of long duration; it is only where the buyer can control
and check the vendor that satisfactory relations are likely to
continue, perhaps for years, perhaps for a lifetime. There is ever a
tendency, on the part of the bookish commissariat, to strike the iron
too hard.
It does happen here and there that collectors are enabled to make
their own prices for their acquisitions either by extraordinary
reputation for judgment and by virtue of a well-known name, or by the
fact of being carried by our common lot beyond earshot of their good
fortune, or, once more, by the force of peculiar circumstances. As an
almost inexorable rule, the stocks of dealers are coldly regarded, and
even those of William Pickering and Joseph Lilly were allowed to drop,
so that, in the latter instance more particularly, some real bargains
were obtained. Yet, on the contrary, the books thrown on the market
after the retirement of F. S. Ellis and the death of James Toovey went
capitally, partly because they were supported by Mr. Quaritch (rather
glad perhaps to get rid of his two confreres). Then, more recently,
the collection formed by Mr. Warton brought quite unexpected figures,
and we feel justified in adding, figures sometimes scarcely warranted
by the property. These instances, and this other aspect of the
subject, strengthen our contention that the whole affair from
beginning to end is a sort of lottery, a type of gambling. If those
who enter into the fray do so with their eyes open, and do not object,
who should?
But assuredly the most egregious case in modern times of the absolute
despotism of name and ownership over all other considerations was that
of the portion of William Morris's library submitted to public sale in
December 1898. The books themselves were, as a rule, below mediocrity
in state, and could not have well possessed for the new acquirers even
that special interest and value which Morris recognised in them as
aids to his artistic and literary labours. Yet the prices realised
were beyond anything on record, and were simply absurd. There seemed
to be a violent struggle on the part of three or four competitors to
secure these treasures at any cost, and they did so. Let the very same
copies recur, and in the hands of a person of inferior celebrity, and
the shrinkage will probably be serious. The direct association was
dissolved when the lots were adjudged to the highest bidders, and here
the highest bidders were high indeed.
To the speculative investor in literary property what can we have to
say? He works with his eyes opened to their widest possibility of
expansion, and carries his fortune or success in his hands. No doubt
there are occasional flukes for him; but, generally speaking, the
greatest have been for collections formed and dispersed without any
view to profit, where the state of the market has accidentally
favoured the owner, or there was some nimbus round the name.
Before you set about forming a library, you should consider in what
sort of atmosphere, of your own or your friends' creation, it is
likely to be sold hereafter. You ought almost to be able to calculate
how celebrated you will die.